Our History
Dyeing with Wild Plants Adapted from Foxfire, Summer-Fall 1972 Original article by Karen Cox
B
efore clothing was readily available in vibrant colors at the local boutique or even Walmart, folks in the mountains—and many rural areas—had to depend on local plants to color their handmade cloth. Certain plants contain chemicals that act as dyes when they react to heat and other matter. To dye wool, people would prepare the fibers by setting them with a mordant such as vinegar and salt or alum. This helps “fix” the dye and keep it from fading. Once the wool was prepared, it was then set in hot water baths in which plant matter had already been steeped. The following information, collected from a series of eleven interviews by Foxfire students in the late 1960s and early 1970s, provide some of the local materials used to dye fibers: Black walnut hulls, root, and bark were commonly used as a natural dye to produce shades of brown and black. Anyone who has picked up a fallen black walnut and used their bare hands to extract the nutshell knows just how potent the dye from the hull can be! Edith Darnell told students that when the hulls are added to the boiling water, “they’re damp and when they get wet, that makes the prettiest brown. Now they might put the hulls in some kind of a bag in the bottom while it boiled. ‘Cause I know Mommy used to dye
Foxfire’s Village Weaver, Sharon Grist, removing wool skeins dyed with indigo. 84 - www.laurelofnortheastgeorgia.com - April 2022
A family ties up their tshirts to create designs before putting them in the indigo dye pot.
